This Week’s Various

The NYT runs a tiny piece about the new Bill Traylor shows that open this coming week: “Traylor in Motion: Wonders From New York Collections” and “Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts” both through September 22 at the Folk Art Museum.

The self-taught Alabama artist Bill Traylor is known for his flat, simple shapes. But in chronicling memories and observations from African-American life, his work also had complexity and depth. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith has called Traylor “the American master of taut silhouettes,” yet some of his work is literally about movement, evoking dances of his era like the Lindy Hop and the Cakewalk, with women in hoop skirts and men in high hats.

—Above: The Flora-Bama — been there once, when Av did a New Year’s Day Polar Bear Dip

CNN Travel does a list of the World’s 50 Best Beach Bars, and #24 is Margaritaville at Pensacola Beach (‘Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that this familiar chain bar is close to the heart of millions in America.’) and #17 is the Flora-Bama (‘What makes Flora-Bama truly legendary, however, is the fact that it hosts the annual Interstate Mullet Toss. Flora-Bama straddles the state line of Florida and Alabama, and each April, thousands gather at the bar to party and watch intoxicated competitors throw slippery fish like a discus back and forth across the state line.’).

—Above: not sure if this one was ever red…

Smithsonian Magazine tells us why most barns are red: because of the physics of dying stars. Really:Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars. Zunger explains:

The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.

—‘Miss Peaches Soul Food Kitchen‘, opened this week in Newtown, NSW (Sydney):Chicken, crawfish, chicken fried steak, hushpuppies, black eyed peas (the delicious food, not the Fergie-fronted band that used to be good), catfish and fried chicken, all washed down with a chilled glass of lemonade or ice cold beer. It’s food just like Momma used to make, if your Momma was a food queen of the Deep South.

—2MississippiMuseums is the website for the Mississippi Museum of History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum (both of which will be under the same roof) and according to USA Today, they need to raise $30MM to finish the inside of the building before they’re slated to open in 2017.

If the contemporary reader of nonfiction knows anything about the universe of American literature — or just its prose galaxies — she knows that James Agee and Walker Evans’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is our greatest nonfictional failure and the finest book-length lyric essay ever written. Five years in the making, Agee’s book was published by Houghton Mifflin (after Harper’s dumped it as unwieldy) to scorn, praise, and sales of 600 copies before it went out of print.

…Agee’s 471-page magnum opus languished for 20 years until it was republished in 1960 and heralded as a new literary form, a kind of hyper-confessional personal journalism that forged intimacies with poverty via the author’s uncharted lyricism. Agee’s journey from the journalistic to the essayistic, from reportorial profiling to magisterial self-indulgence, is now filled out by Melville’s House’s publication of Cotton Tenants, believed to be Famous Men’s first attempt.

…When it was published, Lionel Trilling called the book “the most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.”

…Cotton Tenants was discovered in 2005 after Agee’s daughter donated boxes of his archive to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. The undated manuscript may be the piece Fortune killed. It’s a document enthrallingly multi-level: a “failed” magazine piece too lapidary and too anti-capitalist for Fortune’s prejudices, a graphic tour de force in which Agee begins experimenting with stream-of-consciousness and a polyphonic style, a précis for Famous Men.

This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition in MoMA’s history, and the accompanying landmark publication, which established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art.

…”the largest and most important group of William Faulkner material ever to appear at auction,” ahead of a second event in London the following month.The New York auction includes the Nobel Prize for Literature scroll and medal awarded to Faulkner in 1949 for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel,” as well as his acceptance speech.The price tag for the Faulkner lots, discovered by a grandson who was cleaning out a building to make space for chickens on the family farm in Virginia, is estimated at $2 million, sparking interest from universities.

—From the NYT book reviews:Just as some plants send taproots deep into the soil for nourishment, some writers thrive in a profound attachment to their own patch of earth. As Eudora Welty put it in a “Firing Line” conversation with Walker Percy and William F. Buckley in 1972 (ah, the good old days), “Place does endow.” We feel this vivid, passionate connection throughout a collection of Welty’s letters about gardening, from 1940 to 1949. ‘Tell About Night Flowers’ (University Press of Mississippi, $45) is a book I’ll keep on my bedside table all year. Its editor, Julia Eichelberger, has done an intelligent, sensitive job of collecting previously unpublished letters from a woman who had splendid dreams about camellias and irises.These magical letters capture a time in the Deep South when itinerant souls like the sassafras man would arrive early in the year, “with the gold roots strung on him,” and sit on the church steps to sell them in bundles tied with strips of old inner tubes…

—From The Economist: Scratching a living, A shocking rate of depopulation in the rural South and the first paragraph: THE imposing synagogue on Main Street in Greenville, with its classical portico, raised cupola and shimmering stained glass, was built in 1906 to accommodate several hundred worshippers. In a good week these days, a custodian says, 12 people show up for Friday service, and several of them are in their 90s. The four classrooms for religious instruction now cater to just three children. The rest of the Jewish community has died or drifted away to other, richer parts of the country.It is not just Jews who have left the Delta, a fertile alluvial plain in Mississippi and adjacent parts of Arkansas and Louisiana. Since 1940, the region’s population has fallen by almost half…

What this doesn’t say is that Shabbos attendance of 12 proportionally isn’t bad for the numbers Greenville has; it probably is better, again proportionally, than the crowd we get for a regular, non-event service at my 550+ family synagogue. Av and I have been to services at the Greenville synagogue many times and they are very active, including a very popular corned beef lunch every year that the whole city shows up for, and we once attended a function of theirs at the Country Club and you couldn’t have gotten another soul inside it was so packed.

—Science World Report on the ‘crazy ants’ invading the Southeast:Crazy ants may be even worse than fire ants, though. The ants go everywhere. They invade homes, nest in crawl spaces and walls and can even damage electrical equipment. They’re also much harder to control than fire ants since they don’t consume most of the poison baits that are used to kill fire ant mounds. In addition, they don’t have the same kinds of colony boundaries that fire ants do; this means that even if they’re killed in a certain area, the supercolony survives and can swarm back over the area.

—Someone has a toilet paper-rolled tree tattooed on their back. From the War Eagle Reader, an Auburn grad memorializes the late Toomer’s Oaks.

Above, back when Vulcan carried his traffic-warning popsicle and had a marble-clad base.

No news report of this, but I understand that Lonney Holley is working with the Sylacauga marble removed from Vulcan Tower at the Vulcan Park and Museum in B’ham so that he can sell smaller art pieces in the gift shop and exhibit some of the larger pieces he does.

Lonnie has work included in the ‘When You’re Lost, Everything’s a Sign‘ exhibit at the House of Blues in New Orleans through July 21 (also included: Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Rev. Howard Finster, Sybil Gibson, Mr. Imagination, Baltimore Glass Man, BF Perkins, Mose Tolliver, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Mary T. Smith, and others).

—Longhorns at Lazy M Farms outside Springville, Alabama

—Above: contestants at a Col. Sanders look-alike contest at the Alabama Chicken and Egg Festival

Think Col. Sanders and you’re thinking of that white suit — one is offered on June 22 at Heritage Auctions Signature Americana and Political Signature Auction, with an opening bid of $5k and an estimate of $10k+. In college when I was crazy-poor, I worked at a KFC and the owner would actually dress up like Colonel Sanders, white suit and all. He had the beard-thing going, too.

I took a look at the James K. Polk dessert plate that’s also in the auction (opening bid $9500) since he’s mishpocha, and it said that it had been gifted by Lincoln because his wife had ordered a new service and they were getting rid of the previous china.

—Civil Rights leader, Rev. Will Campbell, passed away this week. Pulitzer-winner Robert D. McFadden wrote his obit:A knot of contradictions himself, he was a civil rights advocate who drank whiskey with Klansmen, a writer who layered fact and fiction, and a preacher without a church who presided at weddings, baptisms and funerals in homes, hospitals and graveyards for a flock of like-minded rebels that included Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dick Gregory, Jules Feiffer and Studs Terkel.Most of his scattered “congregation,” however, were poor whites and blacks, plain people alienated from mainstream Christianity and wary of institutions, churches and governments that stood for progress but that in their view achieved little. He once conducted a funeral for a ghost town, Golden Pond, Ky., where the residents had been removed in the late 1960s to make way for a Tennessee Valley Authority project.…The son of Mississippi cotton farmers, Mr. Campbell grew up in a backwater of segregated schools, churches and cracker-barrel country stores where men chewed tobacco and spat bigotry. He was ordained a Baptist minister at 17 and attended three colleges and Yale Divinity School before embarking on an unsatisfying life as a small-town pastor and then chaplain at the University of Mississippi. He left Ole Miss amid death threats over his integrationist views.As a race-relations troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches from 1956 to 1963, he joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis and other civil rights luminaries in historic confrontations across the South.…Later in the 1960s, after appeals to Christian churches in the South to end segregation in their own ranks and actively fight discrimination, Mr. Campbell abandoned organized religion, though not his faith. He accused Southern Protestant churches in particular of standing silent in the face of bigotry.

…His belief that Christ died for bigots as well as devout people prompted his contacts with the Ku Klux Klan, and he visited James Earl Ray in prison after the 1968 assassination of Mr. Campbell’s friend Dr. King. He was widely criticized for both actions. Mostly very good comments at The Atlantic, too.

If you’re keeping up with Brennan’s, it’s been busy. The property was sold at auction to Leggo/4 for $6.85MM who had been pressing for foreclosure anyway since they already held some Brennan’s mortgages. They have to now negotiate with the new property owners for a lease to keep the restaurant going.